Janet Yellen will be by some margin the best qualified Federal Reserve chair we’ve ever had. She’ll also be the first woman to hold the post, and I believe the most important female policymaker in American history. Fairly remarkably, the vote on her confirmation was just 56–26 with a whole bunch of senators stuck out of town due to weather problems.
I understand of course that these are days of high polarization and lots of partisanship. But this really is a dismaying quantity of “no” votes, especially as the nays were hardly offering much in the way of compelling arguments. Rand Paul, for example, doesn’t seem to understand that the Fed can’t run out of money since they make the money.
